"Plane" with Gerard Butler and Mike Colter landed at the movie theaters.
Before we deep dive into today's movie, I need to make a disclaimer.
I saw an investor screening of "Plane" two days before the movie open to the general public.
I own shares in AMC Theatre stock and I'm a member of the Investor Connect program.
AMC provided no compensation or editorial guidance for this video.
With the disclaimer out of the way, let's get into the movie.
Captain Brodie Torrance, played by Gerald Butler, arrives at his plane.
He introduces himself to the crew and preps the plane for the late New Year's Eve flight from Singapore to Tokyo.
He requests permission from his supervisor to fly around the storm on his flight path.
The supervisor denies the request because of fuel costs and told him to "punch through" the storm.
The first passengers to board are a law officer and a fugitive, Louis Gaspare, played by Mike Colter.
Brodie and the flight attendants personally greeted the dozen passengers boarding the flight
They celebrate New Year's Day with champagne when the storm intensifies.
Brodie turns on the seat belt light and tries to fly the plane above the storm.
The law officer drops his smartphone and watches it slide down the aisle.
He takes off his seatbelt to chase after it.
A flight attendance tells him to sit down, taking off her seatbelt and walking up towards him.
Turbulence bounces both of them against the ceiling and towards the floor.
Killing both of them.
After a lightning strike kills power to all systems, Brodie glides the plane to a dirt road on a nearby island.
Brodie remove the handcuffs from Louis and they go up the road to seek help.
Louis disappears into the jungle.
Brodie finds an old building with a working phone.
He tries calling the airline but the operator hangs up on him when he can't provide his badge number.
He calls his daughter in Hawaii to relay his whereabouts to the airline.
An anti-government soldier interrupts his call by assaulting him.
They fight it out until Brodie knocks the soldier senseless.
He hides behind a desk when he hears gunshots.
Louis shows up with a pair of assault rifles that he took from the dead soldiers outside.
He hands an assault rifle to Brodie.
Both men have military experience for handling assault rifles.
They discover a camcorder on a tripod facing a blood-stained wall in a different room.
A recent video shows a hostage stating her identity before getting killed.
They rush back to the plane.
The co-pilot restores power on the airplane when the soldiers show up.
Their leader shoots a Korean woman for running away and chops off the head of her distraught husband.
Everyone else gets hustled on to the bus and taken back to the village.
Brodie and Louis tries to rescue everyone on their own.
The one thing I did like about the movie was the various accents I heard from the cast.
An international flight from Singapore to Tokyo should have a variety of accents.
Accents are often missing or downplayed in a typical Hollywood movie.
The one scene that I didn't like was the supervisor refusing to let the captain fly the plane around the storm.
If the captain flew around the storm, there wouldn't be a subplot with the corporate office.
Or a movie.
The story may have been better without the corporate subplot.
The movie—like my summary—would be about the plane, the crew and the passengers, and what happens on the ground.
That the CEO was more concern about bad PR for the airline than saving lives wasn't relevant.
The "good guys" death scenes were low key and off camera.
The "bad guys" death scenes were over the top and gory.
Especially when their death was caused by a heavy sniper rifle shot at close range.
I could have lived without the gore.
"Plane" was more like the "Airport" disaster movies I saw as a kid in the 1970s.
Those movies made me so fearful of flying that I didn't take my first plane trip until my 44th birthday.
A friend and I flew from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas for Star Trek Con 2013.
I've been on Amtrak train cars that shook worse than the Southwest planes on takeoff and landing.
Let me know what you think about "Plane" in the comments below.
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Thank you for watching.
(jazz music)